Editor’s Note
Back in the old days — that’s less than a decade and before there were such things as blogs and interactive conversations with readers — editors used to respond to their newspaper readers with an “editor’s note.” Sometimes it clarified a point made in a letter to the editor. Sometimes it offered a correction. Sometimes it was just a simple explanation. An editor’s note was a handful of sentences; maybe a four or five paragraphs. It was always a personal link between the editor and the reader. Only difference between it and today’s blog is the immediacy and the platform. Welcome to Editor’s Note.

Archive for February 5th, 2009

Free news: You’ll get (eventually) what you paid

5 comments February 5th, 2009

I paid a lot of my college tuition and living expenses by lifeguarding, teaching swimming lessons and coaching a swim team. It was great for suntans and exercise, lousy for its requirement that I clean public bathrooms three times a day, and a superb testbed for learning economic lessons.

Biggest ah-ah moment: If swim lessons are free, no one shows up. If we charge a quarter a lesson, everyone comes every time on time — and pays.

Weird, huh? Not so much, as I learned by asking the kids and their parents: Why pay if you can get it for free? Because, they said, when the lessons are free, they aren’t worth much. When I pay, well, it’s a commitment and it matters.

People do counter-intuitive things, and despite our arguments to the contrary, when it’s free, we figure there’s not much value, even if there is. So, what happens when all news is free? When you don’t pay for news online? When your newspaper (assuming there still is one) is free? When your magazine (ditto) is free?

Will there still be value? I’m predicting not. Gathering, sorting, ranking and delivering news, information and advertising is jaw-droppingly expensive. No one will do those things for free (a la bloggers or social networking) for very long. The work is just too hard. So, as the demand for “free” news increases, the quality of news will decrease proportionately.

A reader, unhappy because she wasn’t getting as much local news as she wanted,  once asked me why she should have to pay for her subscription when she could just go online and read it for “free.” My answer was blunt: Because if you don’t pay for news in some fashion, then someday there will be no news.

Here’s a fascinating (albeit long) column from Time Magazine on the same topic, but with lots of solutions. Enjoy.